Digital Assets Law in Australia: The Regulatory Map

By Jamie Nuich, Legal Practitioner Director. Positions stated as at June 2026.

There is no single digital assets law in Australia and no single regulator. The same token can sit inside several regimes at once, and they were not designed to work together. A business can be compliant with one and in breach of another without realising it. This page maps which regimes touch what you do. It does not resolve any of them for your matter, because that turns on detail, and getting it wrong is the expensive part.

If you want the position for your specific token, platform or business, that is what we advise on. Call us.

The deadline that is live right now

ASIC's no-action position ends on 30 June 2026

ASIC's no-action position is the bridge between today and the new regime, and it ends on 30 June 2026. Existing digital asset businesses that want to stay covered while their application is assessed need to act by that date. Applications take months to prepare and assess, so the practical runway is already short. If this might affect you, do not wait. Contact Astris Law on +61 7 4270 8880.

Currency, or something more: the contested question people get wrong

It is often said that a token used purely as a means of payment, bitcoin being the usual example, is not itself a financial product. ASIC has long taken that view of pure payment tokens. People hear it and assume they are outside the system. That is the trap, and the position is more contested than the headline suggests.

The characterisation of bitcoin and assets like it is genuinely unsettled at the edges. ASIC's stated positions on how the existing law applies to digital assets have been tested in court and have not always held, and whether a given token is a financial product turns on the rights it carries rather than the label it wears. A token that gives the holder a claim, a return, a share of a pool or a redemption right can be a financial product under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) whatever it is called. And even where the token itself sits outside, the services around it, holding, trading, arranging, advising, operating the platform, can be regulated in their own right.

Where a particular token and business fall on that line is the single most important question in this area, it is genuinely arguable in many cases, and it is the one most often answered wrongly by people relying on a forum post. It is not a question to resolve from a website. It needs advice on the specific token and facts, which is what we do.

The regimes that can apply to you

Each of the following can apply at the same time. The point of this section is to show you how many doors there are, not to walk you through any of them.

Corporations Act and the licensing regime

If your token is a financial product, or you operate a platform that holds tokens for others, the Australian financial services licence regime under Chapter 7 of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) is in play. The Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Act 2026 (Cth) received Royal Assent on 8 April 2026 and commences on 9 April 2027. It brings the platform layer, holding and tokenised custody, into the financial product list. Operating without the right authorisation once it applies is an offence under s 911A of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), with significant civil and criminal exposure.

Whether you need your own licence, can rely on an exemption or should operate another way is the question everyone asks here. See the exemptions section below, and then speak to us, because the answer is matter-specific.

Anti-money laundering

Businesses that exchange, transfer or hold digital assets for others have obligations under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 (Cth). The perimeter widened on 31 March 2026 to capture crypto-to-crypto exchange, custody and token facilitation, not just turning crypto into dollars, and further transfer obligations follow on 1 July 2026. These obligations sit separately from anything ASIC requires.

Tax

The Australian Taxation Office treats a digital asset as a capital gains tax asset, which follows from it being property rather than money. Gains on disposal are taxable, the discount can apply where the asset is held more than twelve months, and rewards such as staking and airdrops are generally income when received. Changes proposed in the May 2026 Budget are not law.

Stablecoins and payments

Stablecoins are heading into a dedicated regime. The stored-value facility framework released for consultation in March 2026 would require issuers to be licensed and, above a threshold, prudentially supervised, with full backing held in reserve. Under current law ASIC already treats many stablecoins as financial products.

And several more, which is the point

Depending on what you do, the following can also apply, and each is its own body of law: the consumer protection provisions of the Australian Consumer Law in Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth), the credit licensing regime under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 (Cth) where credit or lending features are involved, gambling and gaming law where a product has a wager or chance element, sanctions law, and privacy law. Custody and banking sit across several of these and are dealt with separately below.

We are not going to set each of these out here. The reason they are listed is so you can see how easily a digital asset business ends up inside three or four regimes at once. Which ones apply to you, and how they interact, is exactly the advice to get before you build.

Custody: the most misunderstood area, and Australia is not the United States

Custody is the question we are asked about most, and the one where imported assumptions cause the most damage. The Australian position is not the United States position. There is no direct local equivalent of the US qualified custodian model, the new platform regime changes how holding tokens for others is treated, and banking access for digital asset businesses is a separate and unsolved problem regardless of how well you are licensed.

If your model involves holding tokens or assets for clients, custody is not a detail to leave to last. It is a structuring decision that touches the licence question, the new framework and your banking. We work through it with clients directly. It is not something to lift from an offshore template.

The exemptions everyone searches for, and why the search is the wrong place to stop

Most enquiries in this area start with someone trying to find the exemption that keeps them outside the system. These are the ones people look up:

• Whether their activity is a financial product or financial service at all.
• The wholesale or sophisticated client carve-outs, and whether their customers qualify.
• The small-scale offering exemption under s 708 of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), often searched as the twenty investors or two million dollar limit.
• Operating under someone else's licence rather than holding your own.
• The transitional relief and the 30 June 2026 deadline.

Each of these is real. Each has conditions that are narrower than they look, and each is routinely misapplied by people reading the headline and not the fine print. Relying on the wrong exemption is how businesses end up unlicensed without knowing it, which is the most expensive mistake in this field.

We will tell you which, if any, apply to you. We are not going to set out how to qualify for them here, because that is the advice people pay for and getting it wrong has consequences we would rather you avoid.

Read the detail

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